To recap, Proposition 13 was passed by
voters in 1978 to reduce considerable property taxes and keep grandma from
being turned out of her home.Or at
least that was part of the story.Anti-tax advocates used this populist narrative as cover for a sweeping initiative
which cut property taxes, restricted the rate at which said taxes could be
increased, and required a two-thirds vote in the legislature to raise taxes in
the state.The blowback from this
ill-advised initiative was the immediate centralisation of funding
responsibility (for schools in particular) and the enshrinement of the
principle of minority rule—for what else could you call a system in which
raising revenue requires a two-thirds majority in the legislature while
one-third of the same body could arbitrarily shred our social system.

Over time, more benefits have accrued to
big property owners than to the “average” homeowners the measure was ostensibly
designed to protect.Our state has also
suffered, as our public sector has shrunk, meaning a poorer quality of pre-K-12
education, universities which price-out many students, shuttered parks, creaky
infrastructure, and a capitol which smells like the Augean Stables (and let's face it...Jerry Brown is no Hercules).

Supporters of Prop 13 are beginning to
hyperventilate, fearing that the scam they’ve been practising for 35 years now
might shrivel if it sees the light of public scrutiny.But in their panic, they are jumping the
gun.In an overwrought and half-witted
op-ed in the Sacramento Bee, Jon
Coupal, President of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association (the anti-public
organisation responsible for the passage of Prop 13) cited
a study which claimed that nearly 400,000 jobs would be lost in five years if
California moved to a split-roll system.It’s an interesting (and I suspect farcical)
claim, given that we don’t actually know how the roll would be split or what
the different rates for corporate as opposed to household property, for
example, would actually be.

Paul points out that the passage of Prop
13 created a massive revenue gap for Californians, who still wanted to live the
dream.“They have filled that void”, he
notes, “partly by raising sales tax rates; and partly from the rising yield of
the personal income tax, which delivered more and more dollars because of the enormous
shift of income to the wealthy that has taken place over the past several
decades”.But the tax formula that has
evolved over the decades since 1978 has not led to the kind of stability which
Coupal trumpets from his fundamentalist bunker.What the state has seen instead is extraordinary volatility, in which,
as Paul describes, “income tax collections swing with capital gains in the
markets, and taxable sales swing with the economy (they fell 18 percent from
2007 to 2010)”.

And as Paul reminds readers of his blog,
The
California Fix, even
pre-fundamentalist conservative orthodoxy (in the form of Milton Friedman)
accepts the proposition that property taxes offer much greater stability than
the alternatives.“Shifting taxes toward
land, oil, and carbon”, Paul writes, “and reducing them on work and investment
would strengthen the economy while providing a more stable base for public
services”.

Of course, government from beyond the
grave in the form of Prop 13 is only part of the puzzle, just the most
egregious example of the inconsistency and political stagnation that our
mangled politics generates.Paul and
Mathews’ book outlines what some of the other pieces of that puzzle might look
like: a reinvigorated and more democratic electoral system; proportional
representation to give voters a finer grain of representation that might
involve more than two parties; overhaul the convoluted dispersal of authority
and responsibility for policy spheres across many levels of government; renew
our direct democracy to create something like a partnership between citizens
and their representatives instead of the adversarial relationship that characterises
our polity today.

All of this makes it clear that however
much it might be tempting to simply call for the dissolution of Prop 13 under
the assumption that our problems will then fade away, the reality is that reforming
California will take much more sustained and thoughtful engagement.And that this engagement and commitment will
have to come not just from our political leadership, but also from our
citizenry.To paraphrase Churchill, a
serious debate about Prop 13 marks not the end, nor even the beginning of the
end, but perhaps, if we keep our eye on the ball, the end of the
beginning.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.